On Tuesday, Democrats took the first step on the long path back from the wilderness, winning the national popular vote by an estimated 7 points and retaking control of the House of Representatives.

Voters sent a clear message that they want change — and not just from the most unpopular parts of President Trump’s agenda on health care, taxes and the environment. Tuesday was, perhaps above all, a referendum on corruption. Multiple pre-election surveys found that curbing corruption in Washington was a top motivating issue for voters. A September poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found a plurality of voters described corruption as their top concern (30%), ahead of health care (27%) and the economy (25%).

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Research shows these anti-corruption voters overwhelmingly preferred Democratic candidates. The Manafort trial, the Mueller investigation, the multiple indictments of GOP congressmen, the seemingly endless Scott Pruitt scandal, and lingering concerns over President Trump’s sprawling and opaque financial interests all led to widespread disillusionment in Republicans’ ability to curb abuses of power, giving Democrats a real political advantage.

But this upper hand is unlikely to last long. History suggests that anti-corruption candidates have only a brief window to act on their promises before voters lose faith. Recent experience is illustrative.

On the eve of the 2016 election, when likely voters were asked which candidate they trusted more to handle corruption in government, Trump maintained a 9-point lead over Clinton. Even a quarter of Democratic voters thought Trump would be better than Clinton at reducing special-interest influence. Meanwhile, four in five voters thought special interests had “some” or “a lot” of influence over Clinton; despite her campaign pledge to “remove secret money from politics,” 63% of voters did not believe she would actually try to do so.

Initially, this trust in Trump carried over to the Republican Party. As recently as this June, the public gave Republicans a five-point edge over Democrats on reducing government corruption. But the tables have turned. By September, Democrats had a commanding 11-point lead on reducing corruption. Voters say their biggest fear about Republicans keeping control of Congress is that they will be “too willing to favor wealthy and corporate special interests over the middle class.”

If Democrats want to retain Congress and win the presidency in 2020, their clearest strategy is to take these voters seriously, and lean hard into political accountability and reform. For starters, the House should immediately pass Rep. John Sarbanes’ “By the People” draft agenda, which reins in lobbying, expands public campaign finance, and expands voting rights. According to Democratic leaders, this is already the plan — but it is easy to imagine health care, immigration and other hot-button issues taking precedence.

As they draft new bills, Democrats can take inspiration from a suite of anti-corruption initiatives that passed at the ballot on Tuesday night. Missouri’s Amendment 1 was perhaps best-known for cracking down on partisan gerrymandering, but it also tightened contribution limits and lobbying gift laws and closed the so-called “revolving door” between legislators and lobbyists.

North Dakota’s Anti-Corruption Amendment increased disclosure and accountability, rooted out conflicts of interest, restricted lobbyist gifts, and strengthened campaign finance laws. Denver, Phoenix, Baltimore and New York City all upgraded their campaign finance systems to reduce special-interest influence and boost transparency.

Each of these ideas could be feasibly legislated at the national level.

But they also shouldn’t stop at legislation. If Democrats really want to convince voters they can deliver on corruption, they should use their new platform in the House to introduce and vote on constitutional amendments to override Citizens United, mandate a publicly funded campaign finance system, clamp down on special-interest money and lobbying, and replace the broken Federal Elections Commission (FEC) with an effective — and, critically, constitutionally protected — anti-corruption enforcement body.

To be sure, nothing passed through a Democratic House will get by the Senate or Trump’s veto, and the chance of any constitutional amendments ever being ratified is exceedingly small. But even taking seemingly symbolic anti-corruption gestures would bring Democrats two enormous advantages.

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First, candidates could credibly campaign under a clear and unambiguous anti-corruption banner — much like how Republicans once signaled deficit hawkishness by pushing “balanced budget” amendments. This would almost certainly help Democrats retain the support of voters for whom ending special-interest influence is a top issue.

Second, proposing ambitious, even impossible reforms now can make progress more likely in the future by widening the so-called “Overton Window” of ideas that are tolerated in public discourse. This happens regularly in politics. Take Trump’s border wall, which was, two years ago, widely regarded as a joke. Today, “the Wall” is a serious part of budget negotiations. By championing constitutional amendments in the short-term, Democrats increase their chances of passing ambitious reforms through Congress if they retake the Senate and White House in 2020.

This isn’t just good politics. It’s essential groundwork for any Democratic politician who truly hopes to reform the political system after Trump. The single most transformative leap forward in American campaign finance and anti-corruption laws was in the 1970s, when Democrats re-took the White House and Congress on a post-Watergate pledge to clean up Washington. Mass outrage over Nixon’s abuses of power created an unprecedented opening for systemic reform. No one knows for sure what corruption the Mueller investigation or the coming hearings in the House will unearth, but if the findings are serious enough, the 2020 election may be similarly realigning.

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Democrats must be prepared to act swiftly and boldly to reshape American democratic institutions. Otherwise, they risk proving their critics right: that they are no more willing to “drain the swamp” than the Republicans.

Raderstorf is a graduate student in public policy at the University of California, Berkeley and a non-resident fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based think tank. Hill is a PhD student at UC Berkeley studying campaign finance and political reform.